Have you ever ever thought of how and why Yoga works? It is a good query, and one which I’ve by no means seen solutions for. In actual fact, some teenager places the query to some oriental sage fellow, and I see quite a lot of circumventing and philosophizing…and no actual reply. I used to be making an attempt to make yoga work the opposite day, and I used to be listening to some gal on a Yoga CD course and making an attempt to narrate it to the martial arts that I knew, and the gal on the CD instantly mentioned one thing that made me blink. Smugly, she said, ‘It took me three years to have the ability to do that yoga asana.’ I paused the CD, and ruminated over her assertion.
It took her three years of laborious work and self-discipline to make her physique do one thing. She was proud, which might be the sinful model of happy (with job effectively completed). And he or she wasn’t actually doing Yoga. She was stretching and being a contortionist. She wasn’t speaking about turning into conscious as a religious being, however relatively being prideful about with the ability to pretzelize her physique. What she was saying needed to do with holding her physique in a posture, and nothing to do with the religious aspect of the self-discipline. One among my more unusual martial arts tips is to observe my karate kata in a darkish room with no lights and my eyes closed. I do that as a result of Karate means ’empty fingers,’ and I acknowledged that you simply could not have empty fingers with out growing an empty thoughts. I’m merely making an attempt to scale back extraneous sensations, and develop consciousness aimed on the single and concentrated observe of the martial arts type. To grasp this in Yoga, shut your eyes and turn out to be conscious of your proper, massive toe. You should concentrate on your proper, massive toe with out using physique perceptions. You should turn out to be conscious, not bear in mind by means of physique notion units (eyes, style, listening to, and so forth). In the event you can maintain the physique immobile, scale back sensation, and simply turn out to be conscious, then you might be on the monitor of actual yoga. In the event you can perceive the completely different between being conscious by means of physique notion instruments (sight, scent, etcetera), and simply being conscious, then you might be on the monitor of actual yoga. In the event you can turn out to be conscious of your self as a religious being aside from the physique, then you might be doing actual Yoga.
You do not have to pretzelize your physique and contort it and undergo by means of painful postures. You want merely assume a place…does not even need to be an official yoga posture…and cease trying by means of your senses, and let consciousness develop. The distinction between notion and consciousness, that is the important thing to why yoga works, why karate works, and even your proper, massive toe.
